Malcolm,

I shoot professionally (video and stills) I use a Panasonic digital video camera with the Leica lens system. My daughter has a Lumix (land version)

The Leica lenses that one sees on Panasonic are made in Japan. Leica says that the manufacturing is to Leica's specs. I have not had any reason to doubt this, as the images out of both cameras are superb. Leica glass, along with their close competitors, Carl Zeiss and Schneider, have always been known for crisp, contrast biased images with terrific color saturation. I shot Leicas in the military and used Hassleblad (Zeiss glass) for many years until the digital wave pushed film into the history books. I used Schneider for all my large format work.

Panasonic and Sony both got very savvy and formed partnerships with established lens builders like Leica and Zeiss very early on. Canon and Nikon were already building their own glass for stills and then video.

My experience with the Panasonic stuff is that it will probably not be the lens quality that keeps one from creating great images, if you buy a rig at the higher end of the category. Cheaper cameras can have marginal glass. The zoom range for the consumer cameras is determined by demand and price point marketing. Leica could easily spin-out a much more powerful zoom package with a wider wide and longer tele capability if they wanted to, but it would make the camera price point fly out to the point where SLR cameras are the smart buy.

Just for the heck of it, I'd suggest that you look at the products from GoPro. http://www.goprocamera.com/ These little dudes have become a standard now for action sports shooting, be it stills, or HD video. Every guy I know who shoots onboard sailing, board sports (water or snow), skiing, shallow water diving, helmet mounted setups for biking, hang-gliding, racing cars with fixtured, on-board mounts, etc... they all use these things.

Let's see some shots and clips.